Skip to main content

My HOME directory is full!

If your HOME directory (e.g. /home/username ) is full, then many software tools will break. You can see your home directory usage and quota with:

  • mon_user_info for MonARCH
  • user_info for Massive/M3
important

Your HOME quota will not be increased, so please login via ssh and clean it up.

The command to determine folder usage is du -hS but there is a handy tool that makes it easy to use. ncdu shows you the information of du and allows you to use your cursor to examine and descend into directories.

image

Common causes of your disk filling up​

Large Log Files​

Sometimes large log files can appear in your folders. The tool Strudel uses vnc that sometimes puts large log file int the ~/.vnc directory. You can delete these log files if they are large.

An example:

rm ~/.vnc/m3p007:35.log

Large Virtual Environment Folders​

If you create virtual environments with either Python or Anaconda, you can often generate large folders in your HOME directory. Please see our online documentation on how to create virtual environments in your scratch or project directories.

important

Please do not put Virtual Environment folders in your HOME directory.

If you find you don't want to recreate your virtual environment, you can use a Unix hack to move your large folder to your project or scratch directory.

mv .conda ~/scratch/myenv  #move folder
ln -s ~/scratch/myenv .conda #setup a soft link to new folder
ls -la  #verify .conda now points to new folder

Cache Folders​

The software you use may create temporary cache folders (i.e. Anaconda, or apptainer). You might be able to delete these folders once you have finished your task, or use the tool itself to clean up after iteself. e.g.

conda clean

If you are using Apptainer (formely known as Singularity) to build .sif images, please use the APPTAINER_CACHEDIR environment variable in your Bash environment to point to a larger file system. (If you use Singularity via our module files, you will need a different environment variable. However we recommend that you use the newer and better Apptainer software)

Large data files​

By design, HOME folders have small quotas. Please put your large data files in either your scratch or project folders. Soft links can be used if your software requires them to be in the HOME dirs.